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SHAY:He sent a car for us. We got all dressed up, which for Laurel and me meant dresses and for Clem meant her best button-down. Rachel wore flip-flops, and I remember wondering if she just didn’t care, or if that was some big fuck-you. When we got to March, the host brought us up to a private room at the top of the restaurant, with windows overlooking Central Park. I’d never been anywhere like it. It was so nice it made me feel sick, like someone was going to recognize I didn’t belong and make me leave. I can still feel the butterflies in my stomach, just talking about it. Or maybe that’s the pill.
JAMIE:Maybe don’t mention the pill.
SHAY:Oh. Sorry.
JAMIE:It’s okay. We can edit it out. What was Don like?
SHAY:He was waiting for us in the room. When we walked in, and I saw him sitting in the center of the table, at the top of the world, looking out over Central Park, I thought he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. And then immediately I felt guilty, because he was Rachel’s father. But he looked nothing like her. He was tall, and so…solid. His shoulders were so broad they spanned the width of the chair. He was wearing a suit, a dark one, and he was just…powerful. Sophisticated. Commanding. I don’t know how else to describe him. He rose to shake our hands, and his handshake was so firm. We met eyes, and I just… Did you ever watch the showMad Men?
JAMIE:Who hasn’t?
SHAY:He looked like Don Draper.
JAMIE:Right. I can see how that would make an impression.
SHAY:I had no idea how Rachel had come from a man like that. I felt sorry for him, actually, that he had such a strange, antisocial daughter. He and Rachel didn’t hug or even touch. I remember that, because I thought it was strange he was more affectionate with us than with her. But then I realized it must be because he knew how she was, and he was being respectful. I was fascinated by that. A good father.
He said something like, “Since you’re Rachel’s friends, I’d like you to be my friends, too. Why don’t you call me Don?”
I’d had adults ask a lot of things of me, but I’d never had one want to be my friend, like we were equals. It felt glamorous. And he ordered everything on the menu. I’m serious. We had three servers all to ourselves, and he ordered oysters and steaks and raw fish, all these things I’d never tried. He gave Clem a hard time for being vegan, joked it was unnatural, but he ordered every vegetable on the menu just for her. And so much wine, bottle after bottle. He knew a lot about it. I mean, he could have said anything and it would have sounded right to me, because I knew nothing about wine. But he was very self-assured. Worldly. And he kept pouring and pouring. That night was the farthest I’d ever felt from Heller, Texas. I was a junior at Whitney, so I’d been in New York for years, but it was the first time I felt like a real city girl.
JAMIE:Sounds opulent.
SHAY:Don was so charming. He wanted to know everything about us: our majors, where we came from, what we wanted to do after college, what we did and didn’t like about Whitney. He said Rachel gushed about us, so he knew he had to meet us. That raised all of our eyebrows, and then obviously made me feel guilty that we’d been bad-mouthing her while she’d been saying nice things about us.
Then Don said something unexpected. He told us that ever since Rachel started at Whitney, they’d been talking about what it was like to be a young woman on a college campus in this day and age. How her professors treated her, what they taught, how the other students acted, the resources the school provided. He said he’d grown concerned something was lacking, and that was another reason he’d wanted to meet us.
Clem said, “Really? Like what?” Her tone was skeptical. From time to time, we met people, usually men, who dragged Whitney for being too liberal or too feminist or too…female, I guess. Clem had no patience for it. I remember her eyeing her plate, and I’m sure she was thinking, great, if Rachel’s dad turns out to be a tool, I’m going to have to stop eating this forty-dollar vegetable lasagna. I was too busy being surprised Rachel had conversations of substance with anyone.
But Don said, “I’m worried they’re not empowering women the way they should.”
That hooked us. He could tell, because he said, “The college claims it’s progressive, which is great, but are they actually teaching you to own your power aswomen? From everything I can gather, the college’s brand of feminism is to teach young women how to ape men. Rachel took this business class, and all the things her professor taught them made a good leader were essentially male CEO stereotypes: you’re supposed to be loud, dominant, ruthless. I was saying to Rachel, ‘Are you really supposed to deny who you are to be considered successful?’ And that’s just one example. I think it’s a shame. You’re the ones who have the opportunity to course correct after all these years, and they’re only indoctrinating you into thinking you need to be something that doesn’t come naturally. That’s a recipe for self-loathing if I’ve ever heard one. Rachel sure feels it.”
Clem, Laurel, and I looked at each other, totally surprised. We’d been talking about the exact same thing in our suite a week or so back, how it felt like the rules for who we could be, and what we could enjoy as feminist women, were so rigid and fiercely monitored. Laurel had this theater professor who kept telling her she had to speak up in class, even though she was the costume person and shy. One day the professor told Laurel that she was setting women back a hundred years by being so meek. Clem’s soccer coach made fun of her for reading a romance novel she saw in her duffel bag and said something like, “What’s that fluff? I thought Whitney was for smart girls.” And I’d always known, since the day I showed up on campus, that I couldn’t tell anyone at Whitney I’d been in pageants. There were so many things you weren’t allowed to do if you wanted to be the right kind of girl. Being a woman at Whitney came with as many rules as being a woman in East Texas.
But it was surreal to hear Don say these things. No man had ever talked like that to me.
So I said, “I completely agree with you.” And I could tell that made him happy.
He said, “Well, I wanted to meet you to see Rachel’s influences. And to check up on you, of course. I’ve come to care about you, you know, vicariously through Rachel. I can tell you’re good girls.”
That made Laurel blush.
Don said, “At the risk of sounding like a pretentious asshole—or worse, like one of your professors—I’ve done a lot of research on self-actualization. I’ve been trying to figure out why people in the past seemed so much more connected to the world and at peace with themselves, unlike all this modern angst and alienation. And I’ll tell you something: Aristotle was every bit the genius they say he was. He wrote extensively about men and women—what they needed to be happy, how they were alike and different. And hecelebratedthose differences. It’s a shame how far adrift we’ve come from all that wealth of knowledge, under the guise of progress.”
Our professors had taught us about false progress, so the concept was familiar. We all nodded, and Don could tell we were on the same page, because he started pouring more wine and changed the subject to how Greeks in Aristotle’s time used to make it.
But for the rest of the night, every so often when someone was talking, he’d catch my eye across the table and smile. It was like we were sharing a secret. Like we were the adults in the room, on the same level, and Clem and Laurel and Rachel were the kids. It was thrilling. I started to think I’d done something right, to get his attention. When it was time to go home, he helped me put my coat on, slipping it over my shoulders. We got close, and I…
(Silence.)
JAMIE:What?
SHAY:Well… I could smell him. Spices and wood. It hit me like lightning. The feeling was intense. I was attracted to him, even though he was my roommate’s father. It’s embarrassing to say out loud.
JAMIE:It’s just you and me.
SHAY:On the ride home, even Clem said how insightful he was, how rare that was for a man. We realized Don had talked about everything under the sun except himself, not once. Laurel said he reminded her of her dad, who was always more interested in other people, a real selfless man. That was the highest compliment Laurel could give anyone. I remember sitting there in the car and feeling…jealous, I guess. I could tell how much she liked Don, but I didn’t want her to bond with him.
